Beyond Diitabiki

A few weeks before I left for Suriname back in 2008, my father and I took a trip to Washington to visit graduate schools for after my Peace Corps service. By far my favorite school was Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. I knew of Georgetown’s reputation as the elite school for those who want to work oversees, but the students, far from being aloof, were very accessible, collegial, and passionate about engaging where they could help others. Moreover, I was delighted to find that my international experiences and academics were about par with most of the Georgetown students. In my last days in Raleigh, I gathered the information I would need to apply to graduate schools. In Suriname, I worked on my essays for months before applying to five schools in September last year.

On March 17th, at about 8:00 in the morning, my phone rang. My parents called, which is not typical for the middle of the week. Standing in the back of my one room house, I heard that I had been accepted into my dream school. I wandered around my house in a daze, feeling a bit like Rudy getting into Notre Dame. After the Peace Corps I will attend the Master of Science in Foreign Service program at Georgetown, studying International Business and Commerce.

On July 7th, I left Diitabiki, my home of two years. The goodbyes lasted for three days, and they were not easy. The time has come, however, for me to go beyond Diitabiki. The lessons learned were irreplaceable, the challenges monumental, the experiences unforgettable. Along with this chapter of my life, I now bring this journal to a close.

Final Lessons

I entered the Peace Corps without the idealism that is typical of new volunteers. I came here to learn, and learn I did. Before I arrived in Suriname I read The White Man’s Burden, which made me skeptical of development. I wanted to experience what makes development difficult for organizations that genuinely care about helping others. I also wanted to become familiar with a government bureaucracy, as the State Department was my first choice for a future career.

While my projects were very fulfilling, I still believe that the free market is the most effective way to develop a country. If you want to help people in poorer countries to improve their quality of life, do not start an NGO, begin a fair business that meets the needs of people. The greatest development project in Diitabiki, in the two years I lived there, was the cell phone tower. This was not placed by a development agency but by a private company called Digicel. People in my village think of cell phones as vital to their existence. When a lightning strike disabled the tower for less then two days, a lot of people went crazy. Pit toilets, which development organizations have been trying to build for decades, do not catch on, because there is no demand and villagers would just as soon use the river. Cell phones, however, among a culture where talking is life, satisfies a dire need.

A Short History of My Service

With each Peace Corps volunteer’s close of service comes a document called the Description of Service. It is a good summary of significant projects. Here is mine:

After a competitive application process stressing practical skills, cross-cultural adaptability, and international experience, Michael Brannagan was invited to serve as a Business Development volunteer for Peace Corps in Suriname, South America from May 2008 to July 2010.

Peace Corps Suriname’s Pre-Service Training included a two-month cultural immersion period, in which Michael lived with a host family, attended formal Aucan language instruction, and organized a youth group as a sample project. Seminars led by business and organization leaders prepared Michael with the knowledge necessary to apply his skills within the Surinamese climate and culture. Pre-Service Training also included practical multi-day workshops in latrine construction and in agriculture methods in a tropical rainforest environment.

On August 2, 2008, Michael was sworn into Peace Corps service, and assigned to Diitabiki, the capital and cultural center of the Aucan people.

In September 2008, Michael was invited by the Surinamese Red Cross to participate in Food Security Assessment training, for which participants from four countries attended. After certification, Michael led an assessment team to determine the vulnerability of the people in his region after a devastating flood. His recommendation to supply planting material was approved, and Michael and two other volunteers partnered with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) to supply villages throughout the area with planting material while providing agriculture training. As a result of this project, farmers throughout the region were able to maintain their livelihoods and feed their families.

Because of the strategic position of his village, Michael was asked by the Peace Corps Safety and Security officer to serve as the warden of his region. Michael’s responsibilities as warden included: establishing a communication plan among villages not connected by roads or telephone coverage, running drills to test speed of communication, and developing exit strategies for evacuating the country based in an emergency.

In response to an expressed desire for knowledge beyond the borders of Suriname, Michael worked with community partners to develop a geography radio program. In the research phase, he and the director of the Pakaati radio station compiled profiles of every country in the world recorded in the Aucan language. These recordings, usually an hour or more in length per country, took nearly ten months to compile and covered such diverse topics as systems of government, economy, cultural groups and customs, physical geography, and history. The director of Radio Pakaati hopes to use the recordings to write the first book on world history in the Aucan language. This project has built the capacity of the radio station to share the world with their listeners and increased the people’s knowledge of the word outside the rain forest.

Through his relationship with the Pakaati radio station, Michael began a weekly radio program on small business economics, which he hosted live in the Aucan language. Michael organized multiple resources to write and translate four months of original episodes, using culturally relevant examples to communicate successful business practice to entrepreneurs. As a result of the radio program, community members as far as thirty miles upriver showed interest in obtaining episode recordings or in receiving consultation, and the Peace Corps country staff plans to use his episodes as a template for future projects.

Because of the popularity of Michael’s economics program, a local entrepreneur asked for business consultation. They explored the potential of using the business as a distribution center for local bakeries, though this was cost prohibitive. Covering basic startup concepts of bookkeeping, customer service, sales skills, costs and pricing, and marginal analysis, Michael gained significant experience in small business consulting.

Michael also provided information to Radio Pakaati on AIDS prevention and awareness, focusing on good family relationships. As a result of the AIDS program, people in the region are better informed about AIDS and its transmission and less fearful of interacting with those who have the disease.

In an effort to reduce costs and improve village selection, Peace Corps Suriname asked Michael to take the lead as a site development liaison. In selection and bringing the future volunteer sites up to safety standards, Michael and two other volunteers coordinated the actions of community partners and Peace Corps staff in nearly every stage of the process. He spent days at a time in the future sites, made a network of contacts, selected houses for future volunteers, evaluated purchasing needs, coordinated distribution of building materials, and resolved cost concerns addressed by community members. Because of Michael’s efforts in working beyond his project scope, Peace Corps has fully established its presence in villages that would not have otherwise received a volunteer.

In conjunction with Radio Pakaati’s geography radio program, and a UNICEF youth journalism project, Michael conducted a world map mural activity for the Diitabiki primary school. He applied for funding, and UNICEF sponsored the project in full. As a result of patient training and supervision, the local students took ownership in painting the majority of the mural’s surface. The mural promises to serve as a beautiful legacy of Peace Corps’s partnership in Diitabiki for many years.

In response to a request from the Surinamese Ministry of Education to Peace Corps, Michael taught a peer pressure and decision-making class for graduating students who will be attending middle school in the city. Ndjuka children as young as 12 years of age have faced great challenges when moving to an urban environment without their parents, and Michael hopes the students will be better prepared for this transition as a result of this project.

In addition to his larger projects, Michael also engaged in secondary activities, including hosting and translating for several Surinamese and international organizations visiting his village, reporting and translating for the local radio station, training radio workers in sound recording equipment, giving English classes, providing computer training for four adults, and organizing a youth sports club.

Michael received certifications from the Pan-American Health Organization in latrine construction and sanitation methods, the Inter-American Development Bank in citizenship participation and responsibility training, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in food security assessment training, and the United Nations Children’s Fund in water and sanitation training.

A Few Last Projects

When children graduate from the Diitabki school, as with all interior schools, children as young as twelve move to the Paramaribo to attend middle school. Without the presence of their parents, these kids experience a radical cultural and environmental change moving from the rainforest to a city in their early teenage years. Many children in this situation become involved in drugs, get pregnant, or do not use their parents’ money wisely, bringing great distress to them and their villages.

So I went to the School to talk to the graduating class about my experience moving from rural Africa to Minneapolis when I was fifteen. We talked about lemmings, and why it is good to think about consequences. I specified that I was not going to tell them what to do, but that I wanted then to think about what is best for them in the long run and not loose sight of what they want for their future. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of smoking, saving money, taking drugs, and eating assai (getting a purple mustache vs. lots of vitamins).

I also recently finished my world map. It took about a hundred hours to complete. In addition to the countries and capitals, the map depicts every major river, the tallest few mountains for each continent, every city of two and a half million, other important cities, the Suez and Panama Canals, and some geographic and political regions. I painted the compass point and border with typical Ndjuka designs.

Ba Jotie had another last project for me. He has a DVD documentary on space, but it is in English, so he cannot understand it. We did not finish the set of DVD’s, but we did get a few hours translated. The ability to translate astrophysics is a great test of fluency. Big English words simply do not translate, so we had to take a lot of time to explain the big words. After our last session translating the space DVD’s, my official projects officially ended.

A New Generation

All the Peace Corps volunteers in Suriname are newbies, including those who have been here for two years.

This sentence, which I wrote over a year ago, still rings true. Volunteers from SUR 14, my class, opened up this river for Peace Corps, developed additional villages for more volunteers, and now we are being replaced with a new generation, SUR 16.

Matt, Brittany, and Meagan flew into Diitabiki on the 19th of June for a week in their future region. On the day they flew in, Matt and Meagan were supposed to go to Godolo, where Shelley would teach them the art of volunteer living, while Brittany was to stay in Diitabiki and learn from me. A chief from Godolo, who had come for a formal council, agreed to take the two to his village after the meeting. The parlay was an interesting experience for the newbies, and since traditional meetings of elders usually take place only in Diitabiki, it was good that they flew in here. Unfortunately, the chief’s outboard motor for his boat would not start, and when the volunteers were thoroughly exhausted at 5 PM, I made the call that they should spend the night in Diitabiki. That evening wee cooked up some macaroni and cheese, a luxury for a volunteer, and I imparted my vast wisdom of how to clean rainwater tanks, the best times to fish, and other topics of life in the jungle.

It was encouraging to see how new everything was to the new volunteers so that I could see how much I have learned in two years. Nevertheless, I am only beginning to understand deeper aspects of the culture (such as asking for things that you have just bought is considered very polite), and many common experiences are still difficult for me (such as people expecting me to cook extra food for them to eat). I am still learning new words in the Ndjuka language, and at least a few months ago, my canoeing skills were far from Ndjuka proficiency. People wince for fear of my fingers when I cut coconuts open with a machete.

I recently read a book called, The Riverbones, by a Canadian who traveled for five months in Suriname in search a blue frog and the country’s soul. Andrew Westoll wrote well and accurately depicted some of the places in the city and the mood and life of Peace Corps volunteers three years ahead of me. He critiqued a volunteer named Dara for attempting to turn herself into an Ndjuka, something she could never be, and he worried about Dara’s transition back to the States when her close of service eventually came.

Indeed, Dara struggled with reverse culture shock, and she returned home to Suriname to train SUR 14, my class. My first impression of Dara was similar to Andrew’s, but it came from the experience of having grown up in Africa, yet sill learning about Ethiopian culture when I left. No matter how dedicated volunteers are at integrating into the surrounding culture, they will only begin to see the depth of the peoples’ experience. I found that Dara came to learn this, and she approached her cultural errors with grace and humility, hoping that we could learn from them.

Andrew Westoll, however, is a tourist with a closed, Western perspective. His words rang with a hint of jealousy toward the volunteers who through their challenges experienced a depth that he could not comprehend.

Rapid Fire

Reverse culture shock is a difficult experience, even for those who have grown up overseas. For this reason, I never wanted to return to the States before the close of my service. Nevertheless, when his sister chooses to marry just after graduating from college so that her friends can be there, a good brother goes back.

Thus, on May the second, two weeks short of two years from the time I left home, I returned for the first time to the United States.

I had prepared myself mentally for over a month for the particularities that I remembered from two years ago, the existence of cars, media, refrigerators, hot water, and huge houses, as well as the relative differences such as the dryness of the air in comparison to nearly 100 per cent humidity, the resulting lack of necessity to wash thee times a day, and the fast pace of activity compared to the relaxed timelessness.

Upon my arrival, I walked through the Miami airport, and I cannot express how tremendous that learning experience was. I observed conversations and mannerisms of my countrymen, inspected new gadgets for charging iphones and watching movies on planes, and bought a hamburger. I also noticed that American walk on the right rather than in a chaotic crowd like the rest of the world. After learning this, navigating the terminal became much easier. On my first day back, I went shopping, buying a suit for the wedding, a cell phone, a few new clothes, and my first new music in two years. American commercialism did not bother me in the least. I found elegance in everything, though it all seemed a little foreign, as it always has to me.

As I am used to spending most of my time outside, I needed to take a walk in the woods after two days of being home. The paths were so wide in the preserve, and the underbrush was nearly nonexistent. I sweated on the terrain, but with less than 100% humidity, sweat evaporates and cools people rather than simply drenching clothes. It was wonderful.

My parents and I then drove to Hillsdale College, my alma mater, for my sister’s graduation and wedding. Spending hours with old friends, talking with former professors about my adventures, and seeing my extended family after two years of absence was so very good. The wedding was beautiful.

We went back to Raleigh for two days before my next trip.

My father and I took a trip to Washington to visit Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where I will be going to school in the fall. I found some housing options, worked out financial aid, and made arrangements for testing on Georgetown’s language requirement, all in less than 24 hours. Then it was back to Raleigh again.

When I arrived back in Raleigh, I found that my visa to get back to Suriname had expired. Peace Corps Suriname, Peace Corps Washington, the Foreign Ministry of Suriname, the American Embassy in Suriname, and the Surinamese Embassy in Washington all helped me get approval for a visa in about a day. My last day in the Sates was spent driving to Washington and back again to get my visa in my passport.

My flights back to Suriname became an adventure as well. Our plane was re-routed to Arkansas because of weather, and I got standby tickets to Atlanta and then to Miami to catch my international flight. I was successful in getting on both planes, but just before we boarded in Atlanta, the flight to Miami was canceled. The airline paid for a hotel room, and I continued my journey the next day, arriving in Suriname just after midnight on Monday, the 26th.

I did not have a common experience in returning to America; it was very easy despite the flurry of activity. I did need to take two breaks in the midst of the chaos of the wedding, but my family was very understanding and really quite pleased with the ease of my transition.

 

Monkey Business

Commotion shook the trees behind my house. Well, actually it was George shaking the trees, as I named him later. A young black spider monkey had escaped from the other side of the village and made its way towards the forest on the eastern part of the island. George would look down at us from the trees just behind the village to see if we would give him something to eat, as he had not yet readjusted to scrounging the bush on his own. Visits by George and conversations in monkeyish became a regular part of my day.

An old lady, eager to give the children a nature lesson, told a group of boys, “Look at that spider monkey. Isn’t it wonderful? We could catch it and sell it to foreigners!” I laughed, but to me this epitomized an unfortunate concept—using up unsustainable resources and selling them to buy western things that will break quickly in the harsh jungle environment and end up in a makeshift landfill on the forest’s edge.

Slowly George became braver. The monkey ventured out of the trees behind my house and, watching to make sure the humans were far enough away, he would run to the mango tree in front of my house to check for fruit. To my dismay, George found it especially enjoyable to swing around on my power cable. Another day, George caught an irresistible whiff of food from an open window in the house next to mine. Twice he stole the neighbors’ food, eating it in one of their hammocks, and this put him out of favor with the village.

After George became a nuisance, I saw the same old lady who had told the children how wonderful the monkey was, looking up an Asai palm and shouting, “You are a dog! You and your mother and your father,” a typical Ndjuka curse. Besides the humorous notion of a person standing on the ground cursing an animal invulnerably high by calling it another animal, this displayed another unfortunate tendency. While we should adjust to our environment, such as closing windows or sealing up food when wild animals are around, we tend to want nature to conform to us. We can change where we live of course, or catch the monkeys to sell them to foreigners, but sometimes it is best to modify our own behavior to take advantage of the good things around us.

George later met a dog who had come to visit Diitabiki with his owners. Early in the morning one Sunday, I heard a great hullabaloo as the dog yelped up at George on the roof, and George hooted back. George has been more cautions about wandering into the village in the past few days.

Transitioning

We are coming to the end. The volunteers in my training class have only a few more months to bring projects to a close and spend meaningful time with the friends we have made in Suriname. SUR 14, the fourteenth annual group of volunteers to Suriname recently had a close of service conference to prepare us for our transition out of the jungle and into life in the States.

I grew up in Africa with no Americans of my age anywhere around me, traveling back to the States every two years for furlough. When I was fifteen, in the middle of high school, I moved to Minneapolis, where I literally needed to learn how to be an American teenager. Because I have experienced radical cultural change so many times, I was asked to lead a session on reverse culture shock, the disorientation of realizing that your own country is different than what you know.

I opened with a silent clip from The Hurt Locker, in which an American soldier who had just returned from Iraq walks through a grocery store in bewilderment at the outrageous amount and variety of food. Those of us who had been back to the States later told the rest of us about their similar amazement in malls and supermarkets, and those who had not been back stared in horror at something so regular to American life, shopping for food with infinite choices, as something they had not even thought about for a very long time.

I played a slide show of different aspects of our former lives in America such as family, a city, pets, snow, traffic, and fast food, asking my peers to think about what most represented home for them. The slide show was actually a trick question, as the last slide, a picture of a house in the jungle revealed. Home, for us, is now the jungle because this is where we are comfortable, where people know, and to a degree, understand us, and where living comes naturally.

America will be a place where we will need to take a very active and intentional effort in re-learning our culture. We will need to keep an open mind when the American way of life seems senseless and even wrong, as we reorient our minds to life where we are. Just as we needed to radically adjust when we first came to Suriname, we will need to change again and work through the difficult mental, emotional, and physical weariness of being thrust into an uncertain environment.

We then played a skit, for which I and a few former volunteers among the Peace Corps staff called up an unsuspecting volunteer. We acted as if the volunteer had just returned from Suriname, “in Africa,” as our country director who was in the skit kept insisting. We inundated our poor colleague with a barrage of questions that people unfamiliar with Suriname would ask, and spontaneously started conversations on topics such as fictional music and movies to which the volunteer had not been exposed. Our hapless victim had been back to the States during his service and claimed that he had had practically an identical experience at his church.

Many Americans will be able to relate to our experience in the Amazon rainforest to about the same degree as the people in our village can relate to life in the States. Peace Corps volunteers often find that they cannot relate to anyone, though everyone means well and tries to understand. Being a returned volunteer can be a lonely experience, until we learn not to be concerned so much as being related to as learning to relate to Americans again. As always, we need an outward focus and to take an interest in others rather than focusing on ourselves.

Volunteers often have a fear of losing their international perspective and new, multi-culturalness when presented with the opportunity of enjoying our own country and integrating into American culture again. This is a needless fear for we will never be the same. We are richer (figuratively) and stronger now.

Painting the World

One of the great classic Peace Corps projects is a painted mural of the world. While the geography radio program the Ba Jotie and I have spent countless hours on delves deep into the history and culture of every nation on earth, not everyone knows where Turkmenistan is. To give the program a visual element, I am now spending my afternoons armed with a brush and paints.

To start the project, I needed to ask permission from the paramount chief and the headmistress at the school. A chief agreed to arrange an audience with the Gaanman, and a few days later I was summoned to the paramount chief’s house. Communicating formally through an intermediary, I stressed the importance of retaining local culture while learning about the world outside to better appreciate the context and diversity of where we live.

The language in which the labels of the world map would be written presented a cultural challenge. The Ndjuka take great pride in the Aucan language, but the school on which the map is painted requires the children to study in Dutch. After consulting an older Ndjuka friend, we determined to write the names in Dutch with the Aucan underneath and to paint a traditional timbae border as a cultural affirmation.

Having received permission from the chief to proceed, the headmistress and I found a prominent space on the front of one of the school buildings and visible even from the airstrip. Then I applied for funding. While Unicef was reluctant to fund my isolated project, with help from a friend at the organization, I modified my proposal to tie in with one of Unicef’s media projects, which expanded my own project’s scope and acquired full funding for the mural.

To draw the map, I drew a 28 X 56 grid of 1568 squares on the 9 X 18 foot space. The squares allowed me to follow a pattern in the manual to draw an accurate map by hand. At this point I realized that this project would take a lot of work. I needed to use a plumb line for nine vertical lines before I could use my yardstick to draw the small squares. The grid took seven hours to draw and the continent outline another seven hours.

Then the painting began. Work began at 1 PM, just after school so that the kids could participate as much as possible. The oceans and interior of the countries went very quickly, and the kids painted most of the area of the map, while I worked on the details, and of course, supervision. Watching to make sure certain kids took certain brush sizes and teaching them to wipe off excess paint after each dip in the can was key to avoiding uncharted islands or lakes from appearing at the unconscious whim of my helpers.

As usual, I ambitiously found a way to make the project a lot more work. Instead of painting each country solid colors, we are painting the interior of each country a tan color, with a colored border. This is so that the Diitabiki map can have rivers, mountains, and cities, rather than simply labeled countries, as most Peace Corps world maps have. Later on, in addition to the timbae border, another friend of mine will help me design a timbae north arrow in the corner, and I want to paint the flags of all the countries on the sides. While it has been a lot of work, I have enjoyed working on the mural in the afternoons. Hopefully it will serve as a beautiful landmark for the community for many years.

Anthropology

Thoden van Velzen has been traveling to Diitabiki for fifty years. As a young anthropologist, he spent a year and a half learning the language and becoming acquainted with the culture, and since then he has made a great number of return visits. On his most recent trip to Diitabiki, he brought a student of his, a linguist, to study how the Ndjuka language has changed. Memory of the rich polite forms and various greetings for different types of people has all but faded, except in Diitbaiki, the village of the paramount chief. Even here the younger generation rarely uses formal speech.

Thoden van Velzen and his wife have written several books on the Ndjuka. In the Shadow of the Oracle describes and gives the background of Ndjuka politics and their belief system. During my first year, In the Shadow of the Oracle taught me many of the cultural nuances that, as I am not an anthropologist, I had not picked up.

I talked with Thoden at length while he was here, and depending on the subject and who was around, we switched freely between English and Ndjuka. When he lived here, van Velzen was not allowed to have a dugout canoe, as it was considered obvious that foreigners would be thoroughly inept at such activities. The culture has indeed changed significantly in the last fifty years, and the formal events no longer draw the crowds that they used to.

The legacy of Thoden van Velzen has affected the Ndjuka perception of why I live in Diitabiki. Many people assume that I am here to learn the Ndjuka language, and they feel a little frustrated when I do not learn all the forms as enthusiastically as they expect. The chiefs have often called me to observe formal rituals, and have helpfully described the significance of what they do. Many Peace Corps volunteers come with the expectation of teaching other people, forgetting that from the villager’s perspective, the American is the one who needs an education.

Dr. van Velzen’s recommendation to me and to Peace Corps in general is to prepare new volunteers by teaching them about the specific villages in which they will live. Indeed, since volunteers serve a mere two years and even staff work at the most three years in one country, there are few opportunities to build more than a surface knowledge of the places we serve. My final project will be to write down all that I have learned for the volunteer who follows me.

Junglenomics

Wherever rice is cooked in Diitabiki, it is cooked in abundance. A cultural rule is that the pot must have something to eat too, and therefore, a lot of food is thrown away. Nevertheless, almost every day, someone asks me for food. The reasoning behind this phenomenon may provide an answer to why the West has poured trillions of dollars into developing countries with little results.

Insight A: Saving is a foreign and mistrusted concept. Without refrigeration food needs to be consumed quickly. A fish or a tapir must be sold, eaten, or given to someone else right away. Staples, on the other hand, rice and cassava, are planted in abundance, and waste (whatever the pot doesn’t eat) does not mean less for the future.

Insight B: Culturally, planning ahead is unnecessary. I grew up with leftover nights and being told to finish what was on my plate. Ndjuka kids grow up being told that it is rude to eat all of what is cooked because if someone is hungry, you should be able to give them something. Many people anticipate that they will be able to find something to eat if they need it, so few plan ahead for what, if anything, they will cook on any given day.

As an aside, cooking more than what I can eat to give food away is one facet of life that I have decided not to adapt to very often. Unlike my neighbors, I do not have a farm; I need to bring much of my food from the city when I fly in, and paying for extra kilos can be very expensive. I am limited in how long I can stay at home by how long my food supply lasts. In addition, I do not want to contribute to the culture of dependence on outsiders that I see around me, but I try to help in durable, sustainable ways. Though I explain my actions to my neighbors all the time, people think it is strange and probably even rude that I should have a stock of food and not give it away or at least sell it.

Insight C: A stable way of life, not growth and improvement is the principle concern of the Ndjuka. Because a community engages in subsistence farming, it does not mean that they can only grow enough for themselves or even far more than they can eat, only that they do not grow food to sell. Once again, providing what you need for yourself with extra to give away and asking others to give you what you do not have are a normal way of life. There is no economic growth because there are no markets and nothing is saved, but rather, everything is consumed right away. In the West we assume that if people work simply to feed their family they have no alternatives. In places with few jobs available and plenty of land for the population, people feed their families by growing food. The process of preparing a farm becomes an expected male role, as much as mowing the lawn is in the States, and failure to work the ground is equivalent to letting the grass grow for a year. One family, even if they need to carve a new farm out of the bush each year, can easily grow enough to feed several families, but since everyone farms this way, they do not sell anything. A large farm simply serves as a mark of industriousness.

Insight D: Money, to many people in less developed countries, is like anything else: if you have it, you use it right away; if you have too much, you give it to others. When someone goes to the city, they spurge on far more than they need, distributing the excess among the village once they return home, and this is expected. Saving food, money, or anything else is greedy. Similarly, to much of the world, development is the result of some countries having more money than they need, and therefore, giving it away. When the aid gets to less developed countries, they either use it or assume that it goes away, so the effects of development do not last very long. Economic growth is simply not an acceptable behavior in many cultures.

In this mindset, development is a great and potentially insurmountable challenge. For development to work, aid must be invested or used to buy durable goods such as machinery that will spur growth by increasing income in the future. Development is not simply a handout, such as giving someone a fish, but an investment, such as giving someone a fishing pole and teaching them how to use it. In places where this concept is counter-cultural, development only contributes to a dependence on others.

Instead of serving as an instrument of change, development often reinforces a culture of deterioration and creates a dependence on a new, regular source of resources. When cultures that rely on tradition as a way of life encounter development aid, they find a new resource, such as a fruit tree, which may reduce the amount of effort people need to maintain, but not always improve, their original living standards. This is key. Just as stability, not growth, is a goal, if people can maintain a certain standard of life, that is good enough. Something new may not improve their life, but rather act as a substitute for working for what they need. In fact, many people in less developed countries realize that if they actually improve their standard of living, horror of horrors, development organizations may no longer pour their resources into the community. In this way, development has the potential to severely harm a lot of people.

The best way to help improve living conditions in less developed countries is to begin a fair, legitimate business that supplies things that people need, that teaches people the value of saving and investing, and that circulates and invests money within the community. The free market is where I have seen development success in Diitabiki, and I believe it is the only way to effectively combat poverty anywhere.

A Loss of Endurance

Someone ran away with my baby. One Saturday as I approached the dock, I noticed that my canoe was not where it should have been. This had happened once before, when someone without a boat had needed to go somewhere. After a few hours, it had not been returned, however, I went searching for it around both sides of the island. After combing Diitabiki without success, I called friends in four villages to look for it and even sent out a radio message to the whole river that my canoe had been taken. Alas, several days went by with no news. I feared an elopement.

Sometimes people really need to get somewhere but do not have their own way off the island, and they become desperate. Ba Jotie told me a story about an old chief who had a canoe that people would borrow all the time. No matter what he said or did, the boat would disappear whenever he wanted to go somewhere. Eventually, he bought a chain and locked up the boat. One day, however, he found that someone had hacked the chain out of the canoe with a machete and had borrowed the boat yet again.

On Tuesday I had nearly given up. Ba Agasi, a basia, or chief’s assistant, told me that he had also lost a canoe, and we decided to take a motorized boat out together to search for our missing watercraft. As we were leaving, a woman yelled for us to keep an eye out for yet another borrowed boat. Boats are often taken without permission. One of my fellow volunteers painted his boat electric orange, so “no self-respecting Saramacan would be found in it.” By the time Ba Agasi and I reached Mooitaki, twenty minutes by motorboat downriver, we found all three of the missing boats. The Endurance had been stowed in the reeds out of sight from the shore. Before I even arrived back at the dock, I stopped at the local store and bought a chain for my boat. Now, as long as no one takes a machete to the Endurance, she should be secure. We spent a lot of time together in the next few days.